Page 57 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

She waved her utensil between us, nearly flicking a piece of grain at me.

“About us eating alien fungus on a moon?” I asked. “Specifically this? No. This was not in any of my fantasies.”

“About us,” she said. “About me. You said you watched my streams for years. What did you think it would be like if we ever met?”

I looked down at my bowl. The broth had settled into the grain by then, turning it a deeper gold.

“I imagined the concert,” I said. “Always the concert. Me in the pit, screaming. Maybe a meet-and-greet if I really let myself dream big. You’d smile and sign something, and I’d go back to my life while you kept being you. That would have been it.”

I looked up at her.

“I didn’t imagine this. Never in a million years did I dream of this.”

“This being a moon-stew date?” she asked.

“No, this being any of it,” I said. “I didn’t imagine you tired. Or eating with your fingers. Or arguing with your AI about sarcasm. Or saying things that make me forget how to talk.”

I smiled.

“I imagined the poster version of you. This is better.”

She was quiet for a second. Then she bumped her shoulder into mine.

“You are better too,” she said. “Than what I imagined.”

“You imagined me?”

“Not you specifically,” she said. “But someone. Someone who would look at my world and not want to take pieces of it. Someone who would just sit with me and eat terrible food and not need it to be anything more than what it is.”

“This food is not terrible,” I said. “This food is life-changing. Lyn was right.”

“Do not tell her that,” Zhari said. “She will go on forever about food and how we all need to listen to her more.”

I laughed and finished slurping up my stew before digging into the mini sponge cakes we’d gotten too.

After we finished dessert, we wandered deeper into the market. The stalls got stranger and more interesting as we went.

One vendor sold small spheres of compressed light that flickered different colors when you held them up to your face. Another had racks of handwritten music on sheets of something that wasn’t paper—stiff and slightly warm to the touch, with notes I couldn’t read but could almost hear when I ran my fingers over them.

At a stall near the end, Zhari stopped.

The vendor had trays of tiny charms laid out on dark fabric, each one floating a few millimeters above the surface and bobbing gently.

The vendor spoke in their species language, which my translator said was, “Gravity charms, decorative micro-field generators.”

Zhari picked one up. It was shaped like a small heart, no bigger than my thumbnail. It hovered between her fingers, tugging gently upward as if it wanted to float away but couldn’t quite commit.

“Hold out your wrist,” she said.

“Why?” I asked, even though I was already holding out my wrist because apparently my body had stopped consulting my brain.

She tied the thin thread to my wristband with careful fingers. The charm bobbed above my skin, tugging faintly—a tiny, constant pull in the wrong direction that I could feel but couldn’t see.

“So you don’t float away,” she said.

“I thought the whole point of all this was floating away.”

“With me,” she said. “Not alone.”